Children of Paradise (54 page)

• • •

T
HIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD
A
SIEH
A
MINI
was just such a viewer. She was not a reformist. She had little use for grand ideas or factional politics. But she had given over her life, during Ahmadinejad’s term, to battling just the sort of lawlessness Mousavi described. If the four years of hardline rule were a winter for Iranian activism, Asieh was one of its few hardy evergreens.

The activists of the Khatami era had been beguiled by visions and persuaded by theories. Their individual labors were threads in a larger tapestry designed by men like Hajjarian. Moreover, they imagined that they had powerful backers—that they were doing the bidding of a president who had called them forth as pioneers. Their sufferings in prison had been unexpected, and compounded by feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Asieh Amini was an activist for a different movement and a different time.

In the spring of 2009, Asieh Amini resolved not to vote. She imagined few Iranians would. They had no reason to trust the regime or to believe in its potential for reform. And the reformist candidates were, at first blush, uninspiring. Mehdi Karroubi had never interested her. She didn’t think he
stood a chance of winning, and even if he did win, she doubted he had the will or the muscle to change much. Mir Hossein Mousavi’s twenty-year silence bothered her. He was a politician, a former prime minister. How could he have been so close to the system all those years and said nothing? And what leverage could such a person have if he gained power?

On a trip to her hometown in northern Iran, Asieh was surprised to find her family and friends abuzz about the former prime minister. Mousavi’s history of conflict with Khamenei made him attractive to voters critical of the Leader. That he brought his wife, the artist and intellectual Zahra Rahnavard, into his campaign was particularly thrilling. No Iranian politician had ever campaigned with his wife before. By doing so, Mousavi vividly demonstrated his respect for his wife—and, by extension, for the political agency of women. Still, Asieh was not persuaded.

In Tehran, Asieh met with a group of women’s rights activists to discuss an election strategy. The most honest thing they could do, Asieh argued, was to refrain from endorsing any candidate but to make it clear that they would vote women’s rights. Whoever wanted their support had to earn it on the issues that concerned them. They put forward two in particular. They wanted Iran to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. And they wanted four specific articles of the Iranian constitution revised. They pressed the candidates to answer these demands, bringing the matter of gender equality to the foreground of the presidential campaign.

The women’s movement would vote on its issues. But this turned out to be an ambiguous stance. Could women’s rights be served by voting for a candidate congenial on the issues but who had no chance of winning? Asieh didn’t think so. Politics, in the end, was unavoidable. Some women’s rights activists embraced Karroubi as the candidate with the most satisfactory answers to the movement’s demands. Others, including, in the end, Asieh, embraced Mousavi as the candidate likeliest both to win the presidency and to leverage it strongly against the hard-liners.

For Asieh, the televised debate between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad was the turning point. She had never heard a reformist politician speak to a hard-liner the way Mousavi did to Ahmadinejad. Khatami and his people had been deferential, conciliatory, cautious. But Mousavi did not disguise his criticism. He spoke directly, without fear. He lambasted the president’s performance on the economy. He practically called Ahmadinejad a madman. Asieh came away certain that if anybody would stand up to Khamenei, it was Mousavi.

  FIFTEEN  

A
SIEH

Eve was not tall enough
I’ll pick all the apples.

—
A
SIEH
A
MINI

N
OT FAR FROM
S
HAHSAVAR,
in Mazandaran province, where the Alborz Mountains careen toward the Caspian coast, Asieh Amini grew up in an orchard of kiwis and clementines, her family’s farms running into gardens running to the banks of a bordering stream. Asieh was the third of four sisters. When she was very young, before the revolution and the war, her family still owned animals and employed gardeners and housekeepers. After the revolution, Shahsavar became Tonekabon, and the Aminis became middle-class.

They came from the old gentry of feudal times. Asieh understood that her grandmother was an important person because everyone, including Asieh’s father, had to sit up straight in her presence. In the north of Iran, women could wield social power, hold high status, and work uncovered on farms. But many men still had multiple wives. Because of that, Asieh’s extended family sprawled. Her cousins were so legion that they sometimes seemed to populate all of northern Iran. Her father was a teacher. He had been a solitary boy, given to prayer; he learned to perform his
namaz
when
he was only nine years old. He taught his daughters about Islam, but his touch was light, his faith voluntary, not conducive to force or to politics.

Asieh was five when the revolution came. There were things she would always remember. That she was not allowed to wear white shoes or short socks when she started school, a half hour’s commute from home. That she thought the required dark hijab ugly, and she cried, but her mother gently explained that this was a rule no one could disobey. Most of all, Asieh remembered the three sons of a maternal aunt. They were revolutionaries, all three of them imprisoned under the shah. When they were released before the monarchy fell, they came to stay near Asieh’s family, up north where they would be safe, hidden in the countryside among relatives who were not engaged in political fights. Asieh loved the oldest of those three boys. When they stayed with the Aminis, the house on the farm outside Shahsavar streamed with visitors, who came to hear the news from Tehran.

Asieh and her sisters spun themselves a cocoon of nature and literature. When they weren’t playing outdoors, they followed the lead of the oldest sister, who loved to read, write stories, and paint. The second sister, Afsoon, two years ahead of Asieh, adored classical Persian poetry; she memorized the verse of Hafez and pursued her own writing with obvious talent. Asieh wrote poetry, too, but she kept it to herself. She imagined she would one day be a painter, and after that a writer. She had a relentless intelligence and indefatigable drive.

The landscape of her youth was rugged, perilous, and awesomely beautiful. In the house on the farm, with the orchard and the stream, in the divan of Hafez and the paint and the page, in the mountains and the sea and the embrace of her family, Asieh was shielded from the convulsion of her country: the war, the sanctions, the revolution, the political violence. The country was beggared, young men returned from the front without limbs; many did not return at all. Within Asieh’s extended family were some loyal and some opposed to the new regime. There were young men in prison, and relatives who believed other relatives had murdered their very children. And then there were the three brothers from Tehran.

Their father, the husband of Asieh’s aunt, was Ayatollah Mohammad
Mohammadi Gilani, a member of the Assembly of Experts and, for a time, the head of the Guardian Council. He was Iran’s chief justice at the time of the prison massacres. He signed the execution orders for many of the new regime’s opponents, and he was the judge who sentenced Abbas Amirentezam to life imprisonment for espionage. He defended the use of the bastinado and believed that the execution of dissidents and corrupt elements was necessary to rid the body politic of toxins that would otherwise adulterate its purity. Relatives of Asieh’s father imagined that the family’s link to Gilani might help them—that Mr. Amini could influence his wife’s brother-in-law to help young relatives in trouble with the law. But Gilani was resolutely impartial. He told Asieh’s father to ask him for nothing, even when an eighteen-year-old cousin was sentenced to death after a ten-minute trial because of a flyer he carried in his bag.

The judge’s oldest son, the one Asieh loved when she was small, had died in a car accident in 1978. The other two joined the Mojahedin. They did it partly to rebel against their father. But Gilani was a man of terrible integrity. He loved his children, Asieh was certain of this. And she believed that he was not a cruel man. But he insisted that, before the law, he could not hold his children to a different standard from other people. In 1980 he signed an order for the execution of his remaining two sons. If the boys straightened out, Gilani said—if they became loyal to the state and its vision of Islam—he could guarantee their safety. But they didn’t. They fled their father’s home, hiding in Mojahedin safe houses. They evaded capture and execution, only to die, it was rumored, one of them during an attack on the safe house, the other in the street clashes that brought the country to the brink of civil war in 1981.

This story would become notorious in Iran. The name of Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammadi Gilani became synonymous with an era when the Islamic Republic was so rigid and bloodthirsty that it executed its very children. On a medical furlough, Abbas Amirentezam would visit the ayatollah in the hospital where he lay comatose for the last five years of his life, and he would offer Gilani his forgiveness and his prayers. But within Asieh’s family, the saga was all but unspeakable. Asieh’s aunt, the boys’
mother, supported her husband. In death the three brothers receded behind a scrim of silence that only darkened their shadows, the more present for their memory’s refusal. Even the boys’ six sisters, who had loved them, grieved in silence. Many years later, when Asieh was released from a brief prison stint of her own, the silence fractured for a split second. If she’d been in Evin, a relative said, perhaps she had smelled the brothers there.

• • •

W
HILE ALL AROUND THEM RAGED
a political war that sundered their very family, Asieh and Afsoon spent their Thursday afternoons at a poetry circle that met at the Shahsavar public library. It was Asieh’s first taste of literary life, and she adored it. But when the time came to choose her subjects in school, she chose mathematics and physics. She was good at these, and they would prepare her for the sort of career everyone wanted in the austere eighties, in engineering or medicine. After four years of study, she would take the
concours
, a competitive exam to determine her university placement. But in the run-up to the exam one evening, after studying late, she and her sister fell asleep in front of the family’s woodstove. When her sister stoked the fire in the middle of the night, the burning logs tumbled out of the stove and onto a sleeping Asieh. She nursed her burns for a month, and missed her exams. She wouldn’t have another opportunity to take them until the following year.

Asieh’s father decided that, rather than sit at home and study, Asieh should go and live independently, just as if she were starting university on schedule at eighteen. She would spend the year in Mashhad, supported financially by her parents while she studied for her
concours
with a tutor and gathered the strength and resourcefulness she would need to become an independent adult. Two of her friends came with her. The three young women shared lodgings, lessons, and one of the best years of Asieh’s life.

Mashhad’s poetry circles were legendary. Ali Shariati once met a young Ali Khamenei in a poetry circle in Mashhad. Now Asieh Amini joined such a circle. It consisted mainly of old men, classical poets in their seventies and eighties. Asieh was a nearly comical misfit. She was only eighteen; she
wrote in modern free verse, and her energy was frenetic. She clamored for a turn to read. The elderly poets brushed her off for as long as they could. When at last she read, the older poets reacted with disdain. They didn’t care for the modern style. One of them sneered that these were not poems but essays. Furious, Asieh left and resolved never to return.

Days later, however, one of the older poets tracked her down. He apologized for the rough treatment she’d endured. That poetry circle had nothing to offer a young person, he explained. But her work was very good. He offered his instruction, support, and criticism. And so her time in the city was a poet’s education, despite the hours she spent on math. Asieh wrote in verse and read in philosophy. She devoured the works of the pre-revolutionary Islamic philosopher Allameh Tabatabai, and she learned about Western philosophy by reading Will Durant’s 1926 survey,
The Story of Philosophy
.

Durant’s legacy in his native America was a vanishing one, even as it took root in faraway Iran. He was a middlebrow American favorite in the early to mid-twentieth century, when his sweeping histories, many of them written together with his wife, Ariel, topped bestseller lists and won a Pulitzer Prize. Like Popper, Durant was a former socialist turned liberal whose worldview tracked comfortably with the U.S. State Department during the Cold War. That might have been one reason his work appealed to
the Franklin Book Programs, a nonprofit publishing effort that the American Book Publishers Council and the American Library Association established in seventeen developing countries in 1952, with an initial grant from the State Department.